Wood Playset Protection

Video Transcript

Hi everyone Al Martins from Fence Armor great to be with you all again what is the number one question we get at Fence Armor well as you can tell I'm here at a playset and yes I did major in gymnastics but I'm not going to be doing it on this set today. Playsets are interesting and what makes them interesting is they're all like snowflakes every one of them is different you buy them at your big box stores Home Depot Lowe's whichever store you go to most of them are sourced sadly from offshore so the lumber sizes aren't what you would expect typically they are not traditional six by sixes or four by fours there's some other mill thing that they've decided to do in that overseas factory and now you're struggling to figure out how to protect the bottom of those posts both on the the swing and on the the main stage of your set what do you do well think of Fence Armor as lego we've got all kinds of different blocks we have all kinds of different sizes colors and arrangements to work with your playset so it isn't just an automatic thing I've got a place that can you protect it what do I need we need your help so this video the hope is I can show you the pieces of Fence Armor that would fit this particular set and hopefully inspire you on the things you need to do to measure and check and validate what pieces of Fence Armor you need from our website pick them out and then have that brought to your home shipped and installed on your playset so you can still get years out of it and it's not going to look like it's been chewed up by beavers so that is what today's video is all about stay tuned we'll get down to to the ground here in a minute and look at the these posts in in more detail all right so the key here on this particular on all sets you've got to measure the lumber now this is really unusual lumber as I spoke about earlier um basically we're talking about seven eighths and if we look across here we're talking what is that three and a quarter about three and three eighths so three and three eighths by 7 8 is not lumber you're going to find at Home Depot or Lowe's but with Fence Armor we can certainly help so this is our Redwood Edition um black galvanized would work whatever you're looking at but this is our Demi or also known as privacy fence so the reason for that is it covers the face and the radius you'll notice there's a couple of slots under holes on the side and on the face so what do we need to do for that well this is the three and a half by three and a half version and it'll fit in here with the radiuses that's three and three eighths so we can accommodate that so what I'll do is I'll you'll notice I'll put one here uh and I'll put one on the opposite side and you'll see really that covers that up pretty nicely and I'm going to put it up about a half inch off the ground in this particular case now the other thing you have to keep in mind is you know the screws screws are three quarter inch long the Fence Armor is about five eighths or I should say about uh forty thou thick so we're gonna be in a case where we're just almost breaking through the other side so you've got to be careful with that if your wood is really thin like this you may want to consider picking up some shallow screws and you may find that you want to put it in by hand with a case of where your lumber is really thin like this and that's just right of course the other option is you could come in on this face also and that way you wouldn't have to worry so much about the depth but I'm going to try and get it on the other side and again that's only for cases where you really have thin lumber and you'll notice these screws are also color matching your Fence Armor Pittsburgh steel powder coated beauty now that post isn't going to get beat up anymore by that weed whacker now you can weed whack away without worrying about damaging your posts. If your posts are really damaged like these were you may want to stain them before or paint them so that that wounded area won't get damaged now we've got a combination two pieces of wood that measures inch and three quarter that face from here to here at an angle is three and three eighths so what you may want to consider here is a Demi again for this application now if you tried to put a Demi here you're going to see that this area here is curved and it's not going to manage to protect that not going to look right over here on this one we have to put it at an angle and that'll work over here you can see how you can set Fence Armor at an angle so what I'll do is I'll put that one in on this side first here we have that case with the Demi so you can see the Demi will fit nicely over this side but it's not going to fit here so this is where I say you need a persuader we were down in the Grand Canyon taking the mules they gave us a persuader to get those mules going in the direction we wanted to so our persuader is a rubber mallet and I just want to flatten this side so I'm going to put a little rag over it and and I'm going to flatten that side out now you notice this side is over the edge here so I didn't flatten that but I was able to flatten this without any issue and as you can see the powder coating had no issues with that at all so now that you've got that in the shape you want to put that over there and fasten it custom Fence Armor there you go this case we could use again a Demi a pair and what we would do there is flatten both sides to be able to achieve that corner right so if you take two Demi's and you and you do that you have a corner but when you get into here you'll notice that these two outer edges need to be persuaded flat so that's a solution you can have there or or you can use our new Fence Armor UNI™ for Universal Uni so if we take this and we marry them up you end up creating one full side or because you get four of these in a package you can use it just for the corner and now you've got a corner that fits perfect on your side so the Fence Armor UNI™ is another option to manage corners as we have in this case so you don't need to use that persuader in that case but on this side because the wood was so thin we needed to to manage that way a UNI™ wouldn't fit there. Doesn’t have to be over torqued and then anywhere along the slide and there you go there you've got that UNI™ protection in place we'll say 7 8 by by three is up against what you would think is a two by four but no way it's one and one and three eighths so the combined distance is two inches here with those two so what you could do here again is use a Demi on either side on the back side you could use a full-on Demi here and then on this side we'd flatten one I like to put a rag over it just so it doesn't matter up so that's nice and straight let's put this over here and now you've got that corner so that'll handle that side the key is the weed whacker it eats the corners and it'll whip around the face and Fence Armor because of the radius deflects the filament so that it's going to walk right past that area it's not going to really get damaged the next point of interest are these uh legs different angles we do make a rock wall version that covers the whole face and that's for the Home Depot La Chateau kit and if you need that we've got those in stock and we can ship them to you in black and they'll protect that whole entire face in this case again it's uh unknown angle yours will be an unknown angle you can certainly calculate that but it doesn't really matter not so much the important thing here is looking at the area you want to protect and you can see like I said earlier the weed whacker hits the corner and that's where it digs in that's where the filament likes to bite and that's where you get this damage so what you want to do is look at that distance and in this case it's about four inches the combined distance with that face board and the backboard here so you would order a four inch Demi that would do the trick so this four inch now will handle that face right there and it it just fits perfectly there uh so that happens to be a perfect fit now you may want to get Pro Series which is a little bit taller or you can stack two of these and you’ll get what you want just like new and if you wanted to stack one put another one on top and now you'd have a stacked series and if I had wood coming all the way up here that's probably what I would do now what do we do here um here we've got three pieces of wood intersecting at each other got this piece here we've got this piece here we got the supporting so the two posts of interest are here and here that's our damage again so what I would say is use a Fence Armor UNI™ in this case because you again set it at an angle and you'll have what you're looking for there to protect that corner so the UNI™ is a very universal product to handle situations similar to this and of course for the regular lumber so now you've got that corner handled this one back here but this one back here only needs one Demi because the weed whacker can't get to the back side so that's another situation you don't always have to use them in pairs you can use them as you need them I know this is making a long video but your play center is worth it you always want to make sure that the screw doesn't pierce the other side you don't want to hurt anybody if it does you'll have to cut it off or grind it so make sure it doesn't pierce the other side and most common you're probably not going to have this thin lumber anyway but just now this particular swing set has you can see here a fastener to lock it down to the to the ground here so it doesn't blow away in this case you have a couple of options one you can put it above that fastener location so that your Fence Armor is up here or you can put it below and drill a hole in the Fence Armor so I think for this application I'm just going to put it above for now and we'll let the homeowner decide if he wants to drill a hole in it later because this will be this will be here I could actually maybe come down a little bit further I'm thinking about lunch and then of course they don't have to be right parallel with each other you want to bring the other one down you can bring the other one down. Beauty and then we've got one more leg and this leg is the same condition where there's an anchor great and then on the other side just above that anchor so he can re reposition that. again you you can stack them so what I would do here personally is I would put another Demi here and then drill through it and then fasten my engineers guys so this is the wrap up and effectively what you see here is a playset now and it's got Fence Armor on it one corner two corners got the Fence Armor UNI™ another corner got a four by four Demi dimensional the other's got 4x4 nominal Fence Armor which is three and a half by three and a half Demi's so in fact this whole set was done with the one two three four five Demi’s and one UNI™ and that did the entire playset so it's not a big expense to protect it so that that your playset will last for years and not end up getting damaged by the weed whackers well worth it mention it to your landscaper if you've got a landscaper tell them to call Fence Armor let him do the measurements let him do all the work and we'll send him the Fence Armor he needs just gotta measure the wood and again I can't over emphasize the magic of a measuring tape and this looks like a 2x4 but if you look at it again that's nowhere near two by four right that's one and and a quarter, I'll take it this way three and a quarter so our Demi’s will will accommodate that so he would use a 3.5x3.5 Demi which we have here and you'll see that that covers that section I would stack another one here and it would cover the bottom so that anchors here over here we have the Fence Armor UNI™ and that Fence Armor UNI™ comes in four pieces to make one full set but in this case we needed one here and one here you'd have a couple to spare but they're perfect for sheds for playsets anywhere you have a corner it's a great application for it and then back on on this side we were able to flatten one side of the Demi so that you were able to use this radius to protect the side but this side is just protecting the flat side so don't forget to use your persuader or rubber mallet like we did here as well to get over on that side so thank you for watching really appreciate uh you watching this on playsets I hope it makes a lot of sense to you if you're buying one and you're spending a few thousand dollars on a playset or you bought one used and it's damaged it's always worth staining it or painting it before you put on the Fence Armor so that that wounded area is protected and it'll stay together for years and look great oh yes please like and subscribe hit the buttons as you see fit thank you don't forget to find Fence Armor at fencearmor.com or look for a local dealer near you and always ask your landscaper and or fencer or whoever's putting in your playset um to protect it with Fence Armor.